Playwright: Barrie Cole. At: Curious Theater Branch at Prop Thtr (sic), 3502 N. Elston. Tickets: www.curioustheatrebranch; $20 or pay what you will. Runs through: Oct. 13
Last week, playwright Barrie Cole substituted for injured actor Kelly Anchors in Clumsy Sublime. Even reading from the script, she brought humor and vividness to the stepmother, Shelly. But then, she was reading her own words which she'd heard in her mind's ear as she wrote them. So many words, too many words.
Clumsy Sublime boasts clever and witty linguistic banter (homonyms such as "brrrr" and "burr," shifting meanings such as "check my email" and "check in the mail"), lovely leaps of imagination and knowledgeable riffs on art, philosophy and consciousness. It's an engaging, whimsical 100 minute play lost within an overstuffed, self-indulgent 160-minute work. Cole ruthlessly must edit and cut, shape and focus. Good riffs and funny riffs must be eliminated because they don't advance story or characters.
Writers have ruled the roost at Curious Theatre Branch for 25 years. But writers don't always discern what's best for their work. T.S. Eliot had Ezra Pound (may the anti-Semitic bastard rot in hell) to edit The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Hemingway and Fitzgerald had the legendary Maxwell Perkins, and I ruthlessly whittle down each review I write so it doesn't run over 450 words. Cole can learn from her capable lead actor, Edward Thomas-Herrera, and from David Kodeski, who assisted the production. Their solo material is carefully edited and shaped with both length and pace in mind.
Clumsy Sublime defies easy summation. Greatly boiled down, it concerns Russell (Thomas-Herrera), an isolated 50-year-old man, and Delia (Bailey Boyle), an adolescent wicken. Cautiously becoming friends, they share an epiphany through viewing Edward Hopper's painting, Excursion into Philosophy. The two people in the painting (Vicki Walden and Jeffrey Bivens) are alive as well and we observe their playful metaphysical musings. The girl's stepmother, Shelly, also is present speaking to Delia as if in a gothic novel and to everyone else as if channeling Tennessee Williams, which is very funny but is one of those unnecessary riffs stretching the play.
From its exaggerated language to its unlikely situations, Clumsy Sublime is linear but not at all realistic. It's a fantasy of altered realities, or of how we perceive reality. But fantasy is not a license for indulgence. Under director Stefan Brun, the cast breaths a lot of life into the characters and the mostly-static physical situations, so the play never bored me. But I began to fidget at the two-hour mark when it was no nearer a conclusion and resolution than at the two-minute mark. If Cole wants her play to become full, perhaps she needs to empty it. An audience sitting through nearly three hours of Clumsy Sublime will not willingly return to see her next work.